go make bad art RIGHT NOW

the cringe police in your head are making you miserable

You said “kill the cop in your head”
So inside myself I sought the ways that I fell short
No room for second chances, despite the circumstances
That desperation for connection
And I found a child to try to kill by any means necessary
Remember, I see your struggle, friend
I see that bullshit that you carry

Pigeon Pit, “crazy arms”

It is not morally wrong to make and share art that’s not very good.

The vast majority of art ever made has been kind of bad. Art that fits the general parameters of quality for its medium is the minority. Art that does something genuinely novel in its medium is rarer still. Making art that isn’t up to your standards is one of the most human things you can do. It is utterly unavoidable if you wish to make something you are happy with.

To be clear: If you refuse to make things you don’t like, you will never, ever, be good at anything.

Besides, the rules in your head that you’re applying to your work aren’t your rules in the first place.

For most of human history, finding good art was a challenge. That’s why institutions were created to (theoretically) curate and select the quality and novel from the chaff. These institutions grow more powerful as time went on, and inevitably faced backlash from artists too subversive to be platformed. The canonical example is the Impressionists, who created their own gallery shows in response to the strict rules of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and their Salon de Paris. The end result was a sea-change in what was considered “good” art.

But even when the Académie was at its most powerful, its reach was limited. A motivated kid in a small village in the south of France would have had little conception of the specifics of these “rules”. They would have painted in ways that pleased them, finding the specifics of the style de jure only when they made first contact with the institutions of High Art and its adherents.

We are not so lucky. Yes, the sources of our own rules are more diffuse. There is no Academy deciding what can and cannot be showcased. But the rules are inescapable nontheless. The same bright kid in the south of France these days would be brought in line much more quickly. Instead of painting what pleases them, they would likely follow guides and examples found online. A friendly face or voice would teach them a process for making art in a particular style. They would try draw some idealized, abstracted form of “anime” or “cartoons” or (god forbid) “realism”. Either way, rules, parameters, guidelines, and processes are thrust upon them long before they’re needed.

Unfortunately, the kid will “fail” to follow the process. No artstyle is so easly reproducable that attempting to follow a rigid process will get you from zero to where you want to be. If they try to draw “anime style”, they’ll end up with something like this:

The kid might or might not like what they’ve drawn. But if they have the audacity to post this online they will find out very quickly. They will be mocked, get endless “suggestions” on how to “improve” and have all the rules they need to follow snarkily linked to them.

But hang on, what’s wrong with that image? Who says the eyes have to be a certain size, or the hair should fall differently, or that you can’t draw a mouth like that? The girls in Fruits Basket have eyes that big, many a Shojo boy has a sharp chin, and hair can look lots of different ways. The artist that drew this doesn’t need rules to follow or a rigorous process, they just need to keep drawing. If they drew this exact image a hundred times they would end up with something that looks and feels good.

But likely they won’t. They’ll think “well, drawing just isn’t for me,” as though its a gift that god places inside you one day. Those helpful suggestions and condescending remarks just cut off a potential artist from improving. If this artist continued drawing in the same style and kept posting online, despite the warnings, there would be hell to pay. Their work would be mocked and reposted indefinitely, each new post bringing a new wave of comments. As I repost this picture now, it’s been almost a decade since it was originally posted.

If you grow up on the internet you learn quickly that there’s rules to follow. And if you grew up like me, then you also had to learn the rules slowly and painfully. Don’t stare like that, don’t talk about certain subjects, don’t share certain things about yourself. It doesn’t matter how excited you are about your new interest, nobody wants to hear you ramble about it at length.

Most of these rules went down easy. When you’re an ugly kid you’ll do anything to make yourself more palatable to those around you. Like most kids without a lot of friends, I made art. I sang, I drew and doodled, I made little websites in HTML and cosplays out of stuff lying around the house. I learned Ukulele and a little guitar and wrote song lyrics that never got a tune. Eventually I started recording and making videos. I made some vlogs, a lot of tutorials and eventually even a short film.

I was never very good at any of it, but for a long time I was happy to not be very good at things. I was a kid and just happy to share them with a few friends at a time.

Then came the cringe sites. Reddit is my native home, for better and worse, and it has fundamentally shaped me into who I am today. It nurtered a love of technology that led to my career and formed my understanding of politics through various liberal subreddits (I know, I’ve gotten better).

At some point I stumbled upon r/justneckbeardthings, a subreddit dedicated to mocking loathsome people being obnoxious. It let me, for once, be the one laughing. I knew the rules and they didn’t, and for that reason I could feel better about being fat and awkward.

But that subreddit wasn’t very big, and eventually I found myself on r/CringeAnarchy, helpfully linked in the sidebar. CringeAnarchy was a little different culturally. The neckbeards were being mocked, but so were the Tumblr users. The Steven Universe fans, the SuperWhoLockers. It wasn’t their slovenly and misogynistic ways that made them targets, it was simply their attitude, their aesthetics, their enthusiasm. They didn’t live up to the standards placed on them by reddit and thus “failed” as people.

But I liked Steven Universe. I had learned Ukulele because of it, my first girlfriend and I bonded over it, it resonated with me deeply. I had done lots of drawings in its style, mercifully never sharing them somewhere they could be mined for cringe content.

On that sub, and across the internet, those who dared to turn their passion into something concrete also put you at the mercy of the mob.

For the first time, I realized that failure, by anyone’s standards made you a target. If you made something that didn’t fit the rules your audience had internalized, you put yourself at risk of harassment. But on the internet you have no control over your audience. If anyone who happened to see your work felt it failed they could repost it somewhere like r/CringeAnarchy, where literally hundreds of people would assume things about you, then post “clever” takedowns of the person they imagine you to be.

Since it’s almost impossible to make something that pleases every potential viewer, I realized the very creation of art degraded my social standing and made me a legitimate target for criticism. I may not have been able to communicate that, but I certainly internalized it.

I stopped drawing entirely. I brought the ukulele out less and less, quitting before college. I stopped talking about the videos I made, quitting that too after burning myself out making a short film I knew people would hate.

It’s hard to estimate how much of my pubescent changes were directly the result of this, but I sanded off all the edges from my personality and finally fit in. I took on a series of roles, first a theater kid and tenor. Then a frat boy. Then a tech worker. Finally, I became an adult, and realized that there was nothing left inside of me. I was hollow, wearing a caricature in more ways then one. I made nothing, I only consumed. Then I transitioned.

Becoming a truer version of yourself is addicting. Once you’ve broken down the rules of gender, you start looking at the other structures around you that keep you down. I had convinced myself that I couldn’t create anything worth sharing, and thus had nothing to gain from creating anything. I had constructed a cop in my head that chastized me for making basically anything.

Thankfully my spouse helped me. They create incessantly, ignore most criticism, and have thus become a very talented artist. In my view, creating work that is genuinely novel and often quite moving. One day, when I was criticising something I made, calling it “pointless” since I hadn’t achieved my original goal. They looked me in the eyes and said

“It doesn’t need a point.

It served its purpose by being made”.

That was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment.

Since then I have found the joy of making things for the sake of making them, I’ve written for the sake of writing and drawn for the sake of putting marker to paper. And I feel like a real person again. There’s a fire in there that was nearly put out and it burns brighter with every ugly drawing of my cat.

In a world of endless inhuman slop, em dashes, and six fingered monstrosities, valuing the act of creation itself is what we need. The only response to capitalism devaluing art is creating it even more purposefully. In a world of machines we must remain steadfastly human. AI is trained on the “good” stuff, mostly. Its images are tuned to appeal to the median, its text misses the beauty of a novel turn of phrase, an obscure reference, or an intentional sentence fragment.

To make flawed art is to make human art. Breaking rules and eschewing processes and making people mad is not an inefficiency to be optimized away, its the entire fucking point.

The technofascists don’t want you to try something new or draw your own lobsided cartoons or doodle on the margins. They want you to take the easy way out, to generate a warm-toned good-enough semi-realistic picture that’s only sorta what you were looking for. Are you gonna let them win, or are you gonna make something of your own?